Global Citizenship

At Seagate, our people drive our success. Taking care of employees enhances our commitment to global citizenship by protecting labor and human rights. It also means that our team is healthier, happier and more productive.

Seagate has a global workforce of approximately 52,200—nearly two-thirds of whom are operators in manufacturing sites. This employee profile creates unique opportunities to assure that all employees are protected from potential work-related hazards and are treated with respect and dignity. Seagate also is committed to supporting employee wellness, offering opportunities for career development and increasing diversity in the workplace.

LABOR AND HUMAN RIGHTS

To remain a successful and well-regarded company, Seagate must protect human rights and ask of employees only what is fair and respectful. Our global manufacturing model means that we need to take careful steps to prevent and address common labor issues worldwide, such as child labor, excessive working hours and staff retention.

In the past several years, we have emphasized to employees that they must be aware of and responsible for compliance with EICC, UNGC and internal policies. Seagate’s human resources audit program assesses site practices and ensures compliance, creating and sustaining universal standards across the company. The audit program allows us to improve human resources processes continuously, and reduces the risk of non-compliance across the board.

Child Labor Seagate is committed firmly to preventing child labor, and has a formal policy against employing anyone under the age of 18. As a precautionary measure, Seagate has implemented a structured process with multiple age verification “checkpoints” in line with EICC and UNGC codes and local law. This includes remediation steps intended to protect and support any underage worker ever to be found in Seagate’s system.

Working Hours Compliance with local laws regarding working hours can be challenging in countries with strict regulations but lax enforcement. Workers often will move to companies that are willing to break the law—and the EICC Code. To prevent this scenario, Seagate has implemented robust processes to manage and control working hours, including training for staff.

Staff Retention In the manufacturing sector, retaining staff can be difficult. Seagate undertakes a number of activities to address this issue, including enhancing employee engagement programs at various sites. For example, some manufacturing sites offer opportunities for increased feedback from staff and training for new hires. Other sites offer a “buddy system” to establish peer support for new hires as they learn their jobs.

EMPLOYEE HEALTH, SAFETY AND WELLNESS

Seagate is committed to keeping employees safe, healthy and well—their talent and dedication drive our achievements as a company.

Seagate has spent more than a decade collecting health and safety performance indicators to inform strategies for reducing risks associated with work-related injury and illness. Today, our health and safety management systems support continuous improvement in risk reduction and mitigation. Seagate’s global health and safety standards and accompanying management system often go beyond country-level regulations and industry guidance, with well-defined responsibilities, requirements and training to ensure that health and safety is integrated into company operations. Furthermore, we try to make sure that all employees, from plant managers to operators, understand they are accountable for their actions on the job.

Being healthy on and off the job also means more satisfied and more productive employees. Seagate is committed to providing benefits, programs, health and wellness education and support for healthy lifestyles. Seagate ensures that employees have access to resources to make informed decisions for healthy lifestyles, and offers benefits and health and wellness programs customized to local needs.

Workforce Safety We are proud that our workplace safety indicators continue to outperform the industry average for U.S. manufacturers of computer and electronic equipment. However, Seagate continues to believe that even one workplace incident is unacceptable and has continued to refine processes to drive the case rate closer to zero.

Currently, we focus on two areas of workplace injury: Cumulative trauma disorder caused by repetitive motion, and slips and falls. Once injuries occur, we analyze them and target risk-reduction actions to implement and monitor over time. Seagate also ensures the safety of production equipment by enforcing global standard procedures, the impartiality of design reviews by hiring experienced third-party partners and the well-being of its people by applying rigorous installation standards for layout, electrical, chemical, fire protection, interlock, and operational safety requirements.

Health and Wellness Seagate offers health benefits and health and wellness programs to employees. These activities include health screenings across all sites, 24/7 on-site occupational health support at Asia-based manufacturing sites and access to fitness facilities, such as gyms and basketball courts at many sites. Seagate offers benefits benchmarked to local market practice and cultural requirements that reflect global standards of a leading multinational organization.

Encouraging healthy lifestyle choices is a major challenge globally. Seagate is committed to providing the necessary resources to enable employees to make informed decisions about their health and wellness. Seagate is focused on establishing wellness programs designed to encourage employees to evaluate, improve and maintain their health and wellness. Some of these programs have included outcomes-based incentives in United States locations, wellness coaching in Northern Ireland for employees with high health risks, and onsite health and wellness screenings in Singapore and China. We also have established Wellness Councils to better involve employees in the United States and Northern Ireland in health and wellness objectives. In Asia, we share the aggregate results of health screenings with staff to spur discussions about healthier lifestyles.

EMPLOYEE TRAINING, DEVELOPMENT AND RECOGNITION

To ensure a world-class workforce, Seagate trains, educates and recognizes employees so that they are successful contributors to the business. Seagate’s performance management and career development philosophies are that employees should be engaged, aligned and excited about their careers and contributions to the company’s success.

Training and Development Each year, we offer training on situational leadership—a curriculum that focuses on how to lead based on the individual needs of employees. We have more than 650 online learning and career development resources available to non-operator employees 24/7. We track and report on how employees engage with our education programs through a learning management system. Learning resources include online courses in sales, business skills and excellence, ethics, engineering and environment, health and safety. These courses help employees improve in their job functions and enable us to meet legal, customer and regional compliance requirements.

Seagate also provides a career development program named Step. Launched in FY2012, this program creates a pipeline of talent by providing an opportunity for acceleration of technical and business development. We use structured six-month cross-function/site rotations and formal mentors to facilitate the knowledge transfer from experienced workforce to Step participants. We also offer additional business skill development, and facilitate networking among members of each cohort.

Performance and Recognition Seagate’s performance management process emphasizes individual accountability and recognizes and rewards employees based on results in the workplace. Our performance management framework, tracked by an online system, includes goals-setting and alignment to corporate strategy, skills development and periodic progress reviews. We evaluate employees on performance at the end of every period.

Seagate’s compensation strategy is designed to attract, motivate and retain talented employees. Base pay is competitive with local market conditions, and additional incentives are meant to reward and recognize performance. Incentive-based compensation reflects both company and individual performance. We also recognize employees in other ways, such as letters of commendation.

WORKFORCE TALENT AND DIVERSITY

In a globalized and digitized world, Seagate continuously seeks to attract the best people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, styles, cultures, languages, skills and competencies. To this end, our recruitment processes focus on finding talented and motivated individuals who fit with the company’s culture. We also strive to bring new views that help the company be flexible in a rapidly changing marketplace. In the United States, we hold ourselves accountable for hiring, retaining and promoting minorities, and we provide detailed information about our performance in this area—relative to the available labor pools—to our Board of Directors on an annual basis.

Diversity For Seagate, diversity creates a working environment in which people feel free to contribute their personal best, not only as skilled workers, but also as unique individuals. Ensuring that we are drawing on people from different backgrounds means that we can strengthen and broaden our applicant pool, our team and our business. We continue to implement the Working Globally diversity training program to support our overall global inclusion and U.S. diversity initiative. This program helps employees understand how to navigate cultural differences, work effectively across international borders and become global, lifelong leaders.

Recruitment Within the broader organizational culture, Seagate is committed to local solutions and bringing benefits to local communities. Seagate’s practice is to hire local employees wherever possible—especially when hiring operators. We believe this gives us a stronger ability to ensure labor compliance and avoid the potential risk of labor violations that could arise from relying on third-party labor suppliers.

Additionally, we have examined our practices for hiring and managing foreign workers. This includes establishing a very low percentage of foreign worker hires. In cases when we do hire foreign workers, we perform direct sourcing of workers to eliminate any sub-agents and the payment of fees to third-party agents. In cases where direct sourcing is not possible, we use ethical foreign worker sources that have demonstrated EICC compliance.

University Recruiting Seagate’s University Recruiting program is a critical component of our people talent strategy. Our future growth and success depends on attracting high quality graduates and shortening their time-to-competent performance through effective assimilation and development. University recruitment activities in China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States.—including events with minority student groups in the United States.—have helped us find top talent.

For our new graduate hires, we implement Seagate 101, a training program that helps new recruits develop career skills and integrate quickly into the company. The program also is designed to help new hires rapidly gain a better understanding of the hard disk drive industry, and to encourage networking and build work relationships. As part of this initiative, select new graduates can take on three short-term assignments in three different countries, after which they are tasked to apply their international experience back in their base countries.

Internship Program Seagate’s internship program helps the company recruit young, talented workers who will develop career skills and careers with Seagate. We integrate interns into our performance management system and train managers on how to be mentors.